Creating Your Own Curriculum

As curriculum fairs begin to advertise for the upcoming school year, I’m surprised at the number of homeschooling parents who spend big bucks on canned curricula. You don’t need to and, in many instances, it’s better if you create your own, suited to your children and their learning styles.

Regularly visit art museums to see what artists are doing with art–interpretive art, experiential art, abstract art, printmaking, and performance art to name a few.

Music

Play music whenever possible (as long as someone isn’t speaking) including classical music, kids’ songs, piano music, orchestral music, and choir music to name a few.

Provide real instruments or makeshift instruments. Keyboards are much more affordable than pianos and have different options that make them more engaging for young children. A toy xylophone is great or maracas.

March and dance to music.

Learn and practice fingerplays like “here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and see all the people”.

Reading

Read to your child every single day, even if only for a few minutes.

Read the cereal box, the spaghetti instructions, the signs on the side of the road, and everything that you encounter throughout the day. Your child will learn automatically.

Provide magnetic letters for your refrigerator and encourage your child to spell questions to you or words, like what’s for dinner, or a message for Daddy when he gets home.

Provide your child with a library card at an early age and go to the library each week so she can check out books.

Create rewards for your child that include trips to the bookstore to buy books or ordering them together from Amazon.com.

Writing

Provide gel pens, colored markers, colored pencils, and a variety of writing materials to make the writing experience fun and new.

Let your child write, doodle, scribble, or otherwise “write”. If she likes to write on her hands, then get skin markers or gel pens that are skin safe.

Provide a giant whiteboard or chalkboard for your child to write on.

Provide colorful notebooks with plain white paper as well as colored lined paper. Some children are intimidated by the lines. Plain white printer paper works well too.

Encourage your child to practice tracing over letters and numbers with her finger.

Arithmetic

Count while you are cooking, waiting at the stop light, waiting for someone to get in the car, and every other opportunity you have in front of your child. She will soon count along and it will become natural.

Provide counting manipulatives like beans, shells, buttons, or pieces of popcorn to count.

Encourage your child to play with measuring cups, pouring 1/4 cup of water into the 1 cup measuring cup, etc. so she learns fractions.

Make large circles and cut them into fractions, encouraging your child to match 1/3, 1/4, and 1/2 sections to their “pies”.